I. Apartment

2027-07-25

there's something wrong with you. it's built into your skeleton, you suspect. you drink and look at yourself in the mirror on a tuesday night. just the same as your parents

you leave the bathroom and find the hallway as dark as you left it, but less populated. everybody's left, the chatter has ceased. it's not like you were a part of it anyways. your apartment is often lively, and at one point the cast of familiar faces provided a relief from the ins and outs of your life. but slowly it just became part of the latter and the only real escape was getting to be alone.

you search around the apartment for a hand to hold. maybe your girlfriend is still here, and you can take salvation there. you heard her laugh while your eyes glared scarlet into themselves, but she did say she had to go home. it's not unusual for her to make a sudden exit, and you know she doesn't like it when you get like this, all drunk, all messy. She has strict principles, that's what you like about her, and also what you hate about her, that she gets so easily frustrated. You sometimes wish that you had a different relationship, like the ones of your friends, who seem to drink and do drugs together with an elegance and an underlying care that doesn't need to be surfaced as often as she does so. But you also consider that maybe all of those relationships have guidelines and troubles too, and you've just not seen them aired out in public. Maybe everyone really does have problems with each other

Your friend roxie is asleep on the couch. she was watching an anime. this will do, you guess. you stumble into the kitchen first, taking the Brita filter out of the fridge. the crust on it stares back at you and its red light blinks with a violence. REPLACE, it demands, but you and your roommates haven't for months. nothing here is clean. the floor of the kitchen appears to be, but just underneath the lip of the floor cabinets are untold crumbs and their consumers, flitting around in search of a meal. you haven't seen any rodents yet, at least, so you don't worry too much. you wash a glass from the sink and pour it full of chilled, (un)filtered water. This is mainly so the next part doesn't make you puke

You return to the couch and empty out some small crystals onto the mirror on the living room table. this is exegenamine, an NMDA receptor antagonist, which has been making the rounds amongst your friends recently. it's got the dissociation which everyone wants nowadays, and of course, music sounds great. Exegenamine (hereon, exg) also, however, behaved in an oddly uniform way. it would provide a "narrative evaluation", so to speak. any "visions" or "discoveries" on exg would only manifest as direct commentaries on its user's self-narrative - their understanding of who they were, and how they came to be, and etc. Notably, it did not change this understanding- this was an exercise left to the reader, so to speak. you and your friends appreciated this - dabbling with acid and shrooms some years back was certainly fun, but there was only so much you could really get from them, you felt, and the collective understanding of these drugs- socially and scientifically- made subsequent uses feel less effective. Exg was under study regarding how it could deliver the same effects to every user, a textual self-criticism, but this was somewhat impeded by all the Schedule II red tape. It was also not very available, as its synthesis was known only to whomever kept putting it on the market. Bad exg existed of course, but it wasn't much different from ketamine - if you did enough, you'd realize it wasn't what you wanted. Fortunately, you knew someone who worked at the university's bio lab studying exegenamine, and he'd taken it upon himself to acquire a large batch for "research purposes".

you cut up the crystals with an old gift card- reserved explicitly for cutting up drugs, since you didn't want the residue all over your credit card. you took a few lines, each spaced out by a few minutes, and leaned back on the couch to catch up on whatever roxie was watching.

an episode had gone by since you began watching. Oh, you recognized the protagonist - this was Cyber Heaven9, but you'd never seen it. you just knew that it was generally acclaimed on the internet, that people would always take profile pictures of the main android, Exe, or otherwise Emp3, her sometimes sidekick/love interest (depending on who you asked). This episode Exe was climbing up a large cylindrical shaft, filled with computer terminals. It was a largely introspective episode, and as Exe continued her climb and questioned her place, you began yours, since the scanlines of the terminals began to dance in front of you as the exg kicked in.

it was time for a reflective episode, you had figured, thinking about the recommendations that julian had given you. you'd talked to him about the mirror thing before, how you'd stare into it and hate what you saw, and that actually prompted him to recommend you exg. you'd been trying to figure out the angle for it, since you didn't really know how freely he gave it out, being a research assistant and all- you should have figured the guy loved to have people try it. Anyways, talking with him at that house party, shoved into the corner of a couch with bodies all around you, you'd spoken to him honestly, and he'd understood. The same thing had happened to him. He'd hurt someone in the past, he said, and after that, looking in the mirror, it just made him see a violent, hideous man, a junkie, an addict, a zombie. This was exactly it. But exg had helped him, in a way the other research chemicals hadn't really. Since he had to come back to that moment in the mirror, and exg laid it all out for him. You appreciated that he didn't explain what he learned, though. talking with people who did drugs could sometimes ruin the whole thing. he'd said to take 5 lines to start, as it wasn't readily bioavailable through insufflation. he'd handed you the gram before leaving the party, and you wished you'd gotten his number.

you laid back and watched the chasm fade behind Exe, the critical process becoming clearer and clearer.